Learning Report No. 03

Clicking links that open in a new window

There are many times when I am surfing the web when I come to a page, and don't want to leave the page I am on, yet I want to click on a link. The solution to this is for the link to open in a new window, or in Firefox, to open in a new tab.

What I Learned

I went to w3schools to understand how to do this. More specifically I went to a page about html links. After understanding hyperlinks, anchors, and href attributes,I am now learning about targets, which is where links are opened. I then read more about the target attribute on w3schools.

The syntax of the coding is: <a target="value">

Which is placed in the link syntax: <a href="http://www.w3schools.com" target="_blank">TEXT</a>

The "_blank" is an attribute value.

There are four target attributes

• _blank Opens the linked document in a new window
• _self Opens the linked document in the same frame as it was clicked (this is the default)
• _parent Opens the linked document in the parent frameset
• _top Opens the linked document in the full body of the window

How I implemented it

I first wanted to understand how all of these attributes worked, so I created a test html page, and am going to link that page to different targets. Here are the test links:

• Blank
• Self
• Parent
• Top

Then I actually implemented the "_blank" attribute to the assignment links on my home page.